Observations

Let me start with a quick observation that I have made over the past 15 years about the evolutions of document and the document review process. When I first got into the industry, many organizations had dedicated resources focused on the creation, revision and management of documentation. These specialists were often professional communicators who spent a substantial amount of time creating and preparing information.

Today, everyone is an author and a lot of the collaboration that happens within organizations has become ad-hoc. Now, just about everyone has a word processor and email on their desk. This increases the proliferation of documents and the amount of versions floating around.  If one forwards a document to 15 colleagues to get feedback, assuming everyone sends back their comments at relatively the same time (and we know how often that happens), you will end up with 16 versions of the document.

While many of us have created methods for managing these various revisions (public_contract.1.2c.9.doc, public_contract.1.2c.9b.doc), keeping track of the right version and the most up-to-date information has become increasingly burdensome. It doesn’t take a big stretch of the imagination to see how this could quickly become complex and difficult to manage.

Adobe Acrobat can help simplify and mitigate many of the issue, but it is not the solution for every document collaboration and revision issue. Here are some suggestions about how you can leverage Adobe Acrobat to help minimize revision management:

• Control the modification of documents. It is simple, reduce the number of people that modify documents and you will reduce the number of revisions introduced into the process. By distributing a digital facsimile, instead of the source document, you have better control over any changes introduced into your document.
• Restrict changes to your documents. Adobe Acrobat supports security setting allowing a user to comment on documents without having the ability to modify it. This can be useful for documents such as legal agreements where it is important to prevent unwarranted modifications.

Here are some helpful tips that will help you determine if Acrobat is a good fit for your collaborative review process:

• Does the collaboration process require documents from different applications?

• Determine what constitutes a new version of a document.
• Do the individuals involved in the review process co-author, approver or provide feedback?
• Who owns the process of updating the information?
• Between revisions, do users need to see each other’s feedback?
  • Do you need to collaborate with users from other departments or outside of your organizations?